Melb to Sydney return

I made the trip to and from Sydney last weekend in my Zeekr AWD 7X. It was mainly to see my brother but I also squeezed in a Zeekr event to a pearl farm on the Hawkesbury River. It was a great weekend

I kept reasonable notes of the trip and thought it was worth sharing. I should add that I have done this trip a number of times in my other EV, a Kia EV6.

I did have to wait, minimally but the chargers were busier than previous trips. In my spreadsheet, you can see the ‘stop times’, nothing bad. Really minor hassles. The biggest ‘hassle’ was Suttons Forrest on the outskirts of Sydney as I arrived at the “McDonalds” chargers at school pick up time. Three cars were school Mums charging and treating the kids to Maccas. Ten minute delay for me.

I should also add that I was driving alone and feel that 3 hours is my limit. I usually stop every 2.5 – 3 hours. On the way back, I stopped more often as I knew I’d had a busy weekend and was wearier than normal. I also do longer stops for brekky and lunch stops.

On the way back, I was surprised that ABRP told me to do two early stops and then stop at Gumly Gumly. I’d never even heard of that place but diligently followed that advice. If I had my normal navigator, I’d have asked her to look at this Gumly Gumly place but I was alone. As I got close to the Gumly Gumly, I realised it was off the Hume by some distance and Tarcutta (an old favourite) was very close. I went past the Gumly turn off and decided to pull in to Tarcutta. I quickly discovered the four chargers were down and looking on Evie showed that. Agh, the systems told me not to come here. I spent 10 minutes talking to the guy at Evie to make sure that they knew it was down. They didn’t know and it is an old Tritium charger and he was not able to reboot, needed on site tech help. I headed off to Gumly….along a v slow section of road under repair. Grr.

I have used ABRP for some time and happy to pay for the premium version. I tried to take a shot of a couple of functions that I like. The first is the real time info on the state of the charger that I am heading towards. See this one below

You can see it is saying that only one of eight chargers is busy at this time. I am on 39% and should arrive with 22% charge. ABRP estimates are usually very good, out by a couple of percent – the right way. It says 22% and I arrived with 24%.

Watching the pieces of pie go red and green is quite consuming, especially if there is only two chargers and they are both red.

Of course if I had scheduled to stop at Tarcutta it would have shown it was out of order and none available.

The next function that I like is this one that you get while charging

This shot shows me at Gumly (top of map) and if I left “now” I’d get to my next scheduled stop at Glenrowan with just 3%. The figure at the top is suggesting that I charge for another 18 minutes. I can’t recall but I think I have ABRP set to arrive with 25% or the like. This means you can ‘wing it’ if you were in a hurry.

BTW the fastest charging that I saw on the trip was 191 kW but it is almost incidental for me. I plug in, coffee and toilet and a short walk…then go again. Fast is nice but not critical.

Here is the summary

Some things to note

The average consumption for the two long legs is close enough to 20 kWh/100km. Both legs had some slower parts to the trip (Sydney traffic).
In Sydney to and from the Zeekr event, the consumption was MUCH better (under 15). This is better than around town in Melbourne, not sure why as it was to and from the event and so uphill one way would be downhill the other.
I started with a full charge and filled back up when I got home to work out the total costs. Total charging was $271, cheaper than ICE but not a lot. Public charging is much more expensive than home charging.
On the way home you can see my fruitless Tarcutta stop and a short stop for a leg stretch an hour from home

Other things to note

Adaptive cruise control (ACC) is good but not perfect. About par with my other cars
Lane centre control (LCC) is very good a lot of the time but occasionally annoyed me. I have worked out that I can ‘ease it’ a little right or left without it getting upset. I find that passing a truck it is a little too close and so I stroke the wheel a little right and all is good.
Auto-lane change is great when it is happy but when it fails it is bad. I had a couple of occasions when it started the lane change then said ‘cancelling lane change’ and also turned off the ACC. So I didn’t move across and slowed rapidly. The cause may have been bugs on sensors, I tried my best to keep them clean but you can see below the state of the car (before and after)